It was meant to be the final exhibition held at the Met Breuer — the Metropolitan Museum’s Brutalist-style satellite campus for modern and contemporary art since 2016, which was set to be turned over to the Frick Collection later this year. But almost immediately after the show opened on March 4, “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All,” like virtually every other cultural event in the world, was forced to close its doors. Thankfully, the coronavirus has not halted production of the visual books published to coincide with such art openings; no longer just gift shop purchases or collectors’ coffee-table adornments, these exhibition catalogs are now the only tickets we have. They can also be stirring exhibitions in their own right.

Richter’s “Ice,” 1981.Credit…Gerhard Richter

“Gerhard Richter” spans the contemporary German artist’s six-decade career, which has encompassed everything from drawn illustrations for “The Diary of Anne Frank” to large-scale glass installations, Abstract Expressionist paintings and those famous (distressed and distressing) photorealist paintings of 9/11.

One of Richter’s “Birkenau” paintings, 2014.Credit…Gerhard Richter

The second half of the book reproduces images, many of them full-page, of the works you’d have found on the Breuer’s walls. But it’s the essays in the book’s first half that provide the scholarly context and critique that museumgoers wouldn’t have found simply by reading wall plaques. Buchloh, an art history professor at Harvard, addresses the ethics of Richter’s 2014 “Birkenau” paintings and the artist’s career-long preoccupation with representing the Holocaust. The Met curator Brinda Kumar dissects decades’ worth of Richter’s landscapes, including a series called “Transformation” in which a snow-capped mountainscape becomes so abstracted it looks eerily like a sonogram. In his essay “In a Glass, Darkly,” Princeton’s Hal Foster names the “tension” in Richter’s 1967 “4 Panes of Glass,” “between what we know — there are four large identical rectangles in front of us — and what we perceive.” Through this dissonance, Foster argues, in an apt summary of Richter’s entire oeuvre, the artist “stages an almost Cartesian doubt about ‘our apprehension of reality.’”

“The one thing I knew and understood while I was sitting on death row,” the Tennessee inmate Ndume Olatushani said in an interview after he was released: “Even though you’ve got me in this colorless environment, you can’t stop the color that was actually happening in my head.” Imprisoned for 27 years and sentenced to death, for a murder he didn’t commit, Olatushani had nowhere to turn but to art. A 1993 painting called “Winds of Change,” reproduced in Fleetwood’s book “Marking Time,” presents four black figures draped in vivid, jewel-toned fabrics looking out at an open expanse of lush green land, high above a calm blue river. “Through Olatushani’s use of color and depictions of free black people,” Fleetwood writes, “he created imaginary worlds and communities that sustained him during his incarceration.”

At the time when Tameca Cole completed “Locked in a Dark Calm,” from an Alabama prison in 2016, “I was so angry that I wanted to explode,” she said.Credit…Tameca Cole and Die Jim Crow

He wasn’t alone. Fleetwood, an American studies professor at Rutgers, has spent the better part of a decade studying the visual culture in and around American prisons. It’s an intimate project, motivated by her grief for friends and family members whom she’s watched slip in and out of the system since her childhood: “There has never been a time in my life when prison didn’t hover as a real and present threat over us.” But the stakes for this impressive book (and the corresponding, indefinitely postponed exhibit at MoMA PS1) are also political: This is a sociological investigation into prison art not just as an aesthetic category, but as part of “an abolitionist vision to end human caging.”

Fifteen feet tall and 40 feet wide, Jesse Krimes’s “Apokaluptein 16389067” (2010-13) is a collage made from found objects like prison bed sheets and cut-out ads from The Times.Credit…Jesse Krimes

That is, the beauty in these often painful images (like Muhammad al Ansi’s 2016 untitled painting of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler who drowned as his family sought refuge across the Mediterranean) powerfully reclaims the visual idea of what it means to be imprisoned. Fleetwood seeks to revise the mainstream media narrative transmitted through “assaultive and dehumanizing images, such as ‘wanted’ posters, arrest photographs, crime-scene images and mug shots,” by letting us see the diverse array of “studio photos, handmade greeting cards, drawings and other pieces of art made by incarcerated people” that offer a story we on the outside have never really heard.

If “Marking Time” explores art that looks inward, created from places of captivity both physical and mental, “Writing the Future” is about modes of self-expression — 1980s street art, music and fashion — that could only have taken place in public, as a collective, in freedom.

Basquiat’s 1983 acrylic and oil painting, “Hollywood Africans.”Credit…Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York

In recent years Jean-Michel Basquiat has made headlines for the untitled 1982 painting of a skull that sold for $110.5 million, the most money ever paid at auction for an American artwork. But the surroundings in which the Brooklyn-born son of a Haitian immigrant father and a Puerto Rican mother worked, before his death of a heroin overdose at 27, were about as far from the world of Sotheby’s and billionaire collectors as one could imagine.

The companion book to a now-closed exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, “Writing the Future” traces Basquiat’s engagement with a downtown New York milieu, which included the likes of Keith Haring, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura and Lady Pink. This distinctive group protested racial and socioeconomic injustice through collaborative art forms like graffiti and hip-hop, for as the critic Carlo McCormick puts it in an essay here, they “could not be moved by something that did not make them move.” These were genres that were at the time excluded from the dominant (read: white) cultural conversation, and “caused the derelict canvas of the city to experience a renaissance of style.”

Some images in the book, like the two-page spreads of Basquiat’s post-graffiti oil-stick works, make the reader long for up-close contact with these imposing real-life canvases, 6 feet by 11 feet, that no printed page could ever approximate. But to leaf through this prodigy’s oeuvre intermingled with photos of what he called “just … you know, my friends and stuff”; of their tags brightening storefronts and subway cars, of the boomboxes and leather jackets and reference books they at once desecrated and elevated, is to hold in your hands the record of a place and a time and a togetherness we can only hope one day to experience again.

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The Kootenay Gallery of Art in Castlegar is in the process of creating a new virtual gift store.

Art curator Maggie Shirley said the virtual store is slated to go online in July and will feature up to 300 pottery, jewellery and woodworking items created by West Kootenay artists.

The gallery started the project to help make up for lost revenue since it has been shut down since mid-March due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.

The new website will have an accessible layout for everyone, according to Shirley.

“We’ve been categorizing each art piece as we put it onto the virtual store,” said Shirley.

“One category will let customers search for different objects on the site while another category will let people search for individual artists.”

The art gallery is setting up a completely new website for the virtual store and will have debit and credit card payment options. Links will also be put on the art gallery’s existing website and social media pages to direct people to the virtual store.

Shirley said the project has been time consuming, especially since it takes staff up to 30 minutes to photograph, weigh, measure and put each object online.

Customers will either be able to pick up their items at the art gallery or have them delivered or shipped to their door.

While the items will be able to be shipped across Canada and the United States, Shirley said the high shipping costs could deter some customers away.

Despite the difficulties, Shirley said now has never been a better time to launch the store.

“This is a really important transition time for us and a lot of local businesses. We really want to survive these difficult times and grow,” said Shirley.

“This is a big risk were taking, especially since we don’t know if we’re going to get enough traffic to the virtual store to make it worthwhile. However, this is the future of how people will buy things and its a perfect time to get on the bandwagon.”

Shirley hopes that the art gallery will be able to open its physical store again in September.

Levi Nelson art on display in downtown Pemberton – Pique Newsmagazine

Pieces by Levi Nelson, a Lil’wat Nation artist in his last year at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, are now installed on hydro boxes along Portage Road and on the utility box at the Downtown Community Barn.

“We are incredibly grateful and honoured that Levi shared his artwork with us,” the Village of Pemberton said on a Facebook post on Friday, June 5.

Nelson’s work has been exhibited at the Talking Stick Festival, the Museum of Anthropology, North Vancouver City Art Scape, and the Emily Carr University of Art & Design Aboriginal Student Art Show. He also recently became the first Lil’wat Nation artist to have a piece in the Audain Art Museum’s permanent collection.

The recent hydro box wraps were made possible thanks to a contribution from BC Hydro’s beautification fund.

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Applications being accepted for public art funding – paNOW

Macleod Campbell explained they are also happy to support public art projects as they help to improve the overall quality of life for people in the city.

“It’s nice to have public art for viewing at this time as well as of course supporting the artist,” she said.

Eligible groups can include a range of organizations from local art groups to private businesses. In order to be eligible, the group has to be working with a professional artist and the piece must be displayed publicly.

There is not a hard deadline for people to apply for funding. Macleod Campbell said applications are subject to approval from the art working committee and city council.

Macleod Campbell explained the city is also working to make people aware of the art which is on display in public spaces around the city, as they have created a public art tour brochure. The document is currently available on the city website and they are looking to get physical copies out into the public.

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